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The
assassination of Benazir Bhutto is the subject of all sorts of
speculation, even over the
basic facts of her death. On the latter the explanations range from the
claim that she hit her head on a knob (the story of the Musharif
government) to she was zapped by a high-tech laser (the version of one
doctor and some of her supporters).
Eyewitnesses
say she was shot by a clean-shaven young man who stood only a few feet
from her car, and that version seems to be confirmed by an amateur
video of her procession at the time the assassination took place.
The
government is probably anxious to debunk the latter explanation because
it would confirm that the state failed to provide serious security for
her. However, the Pakistani
authorities' version of the assassination is so improbable and so
contradictory and so clumsily presented that it has encouraged the
theories about the responsibility of the Musharaf government or at least
its complicity in the murder.
The Pakistani government's apparent ineptness in handling the
investigation of the assassination is undoubtedly a reflection of its
underlying political contradictions.
The
outburst of mass rage provoked by the killing make one thing clear:
Pakistan has become explosive. The outburst of popular anger was
directed not only against the Musharaf government, which has evidently
lost any credibility it may once have had, but against U.S. imperialism
and the rich and powerful in general.
It is notable, for example, how many banks have been attacked
and sacked in the rioting.
A
Dec. 30 article in the
Washington Post pointed up the
revolutionary mood in the country: "'What is really horrifying
about the past couple of days is neither the intensity of the violence
nor its apparent senselessness, but the fact that there are so many
people in the country who have nothing to lose and who believe, perhaps
quite rightly, that the normal channels of raising their complaints -
the legal and law enforcement systems - are entirely ineffective or
biased,' columnist Hajrah Mumtaz wrote in the English-language Dawn
newspaper. 'The riots were ugly because the root issues feeding them
are ugly.'"
The
U.S. government is being discredited even more among the Pakistani
masses, along with Musharaf, despite its attempts to take its distance
from him and pose as an advocate of parliamentary rule, as opposed to
military dictatorship. In fact, Pakistan has been ruled by military
dictatorships for most of its history and the U.S. has continued to
embrace it as a close ally all that time. The U.S. rulers have
obviously been looking for a more credible governmental formula in
Pakistan as Musharaf's star has disastrously waned.
The
U.S. formula was a deal between the military strongman and the supposed
champion of parliamentary democracy, Benazir Bhutto, whose father
presided over an episode of parliamentary rule and was executed by a
military dictator. Even before the assassination, it was evident that this
scheme had failed because Musharaf was unwilling or unable to keep his
commitments to Bhutto.
Since
Bhutto's death, documents have been released showing that she feared
that he would have a hand in assassinating her and that his regime had
plans for rigging the elections that were supposed to take place in
January. Moreover, Musharaf had declared martial law in defiance of
U.S. criticism in the name of fighting the radical Islamists but
directed his repression essentially against the secular liberal opposition
and in particularly against Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP). His
campaign against the secular liberals was actually assisted by Islamic
fundamentalists, who seized the PPP leader Imran Khan and turned him
over to Musharaf's police.
Military
dictatorship, moreover, is usually a pretty unwieldy and inflexible
form of government. As the example of Latin America since 1985 shows,
U.S. imperialism prefers bourgeois parliamentary forms when it thinks
they can be maintained.
The
U.S. was undoubtedly anxious to force Musharaf into a tandem with
Benazir Bhutto also because it did not really trust him. Like all the
military dictatorships before him, he has relied on the support of
Islamists. And despite his fervent denials that he any longer has anything
to do with such people and the pious statements by U.S. officials about
how great an ally he is in the "war against terrorism," it
would be hard to find any informed observer that thinks that he has
broken all his ties with Islamists and purged them from the state
organs.
The
fact that some Islamists have tried to assassinate him several times
does not mean that Musharaf has no deals with them. Islamist and
Pakistani politics are more complicated than that. The involvement of
the state intelligence agency, the ISI, with such forces is too
deepgoing and longstanding.
Furthermore,
the existence of the state of Pakistan itself is based on Islamism.
There is no other rationale for its separation from India or for
uniting the various nationalities that make it up. It is the only major state based on
religious identification alone. Even the increasingly theocratic Israel
was founded on the idea that Jews were a nation and not a religion.
Even
Benazir Bhutto's own government relied on Islamists. It was under her
government that the ISI organized the Taliban, and every Pakistani
government has given covert support to Islamist groups engaged in
terrorist campaigns against Indian-occupied Kashmir. Complicity with Islamist fanaticism
is an integral part of the Pakistani bourgeois state.
Islamism
has been a pillar of social conservatism and thus useful both to the
ruling class in Pakistan and to U.S. imperialism. It was useful to
British imperialism before them. Of course, there are also aspects and
varieties of Islamism that appear to poor masses in Pakistan as an
alternative to the rule and institutions of a ruling class subordinate
to U.S. and British imperialism.
Both
the imperialists and the Pakistani ruling class have found Islamists to
be very tricky allies, but they have not been able to avoid
entanglements with them. And these alliances have involved some very
complex balancing, like the U.S. game in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What
the assassination of Bhutto and the mass response to it shows is that
the frustration of the masses in Pakistan has reached the point where
it is very difficult for the conservative interests to find a formula
for containing it. The elections have now been postponed, but it seems
almost certain that they will be a disaster for Musharaf, and that no
bourgeois opposition party is going to dare make any visible deals with
him.
Moreover,
the immediate beneficiary of the mass outrage at the assassination of
Bhutto will undoubtedly be her party, which has extreme contradictions.
For example, the appointment of her 19-year-old son as her successor
shows that although the party has a popular base it is dominated by one
rich landlord family.
It
is going to be hard for the bourgeois opposition to get rid of Musharaf
without weakening the repressive power of the state or without allowing
the masses to express their anti-imperialist and anti-ruling-class
feelings. Moreover, deals with the Islamists are becoming more
difficult.
To
some extent, the latter have lost credibility as an alternative to the
status quo because they have ruled the frontier provinces for some time
without offering any satisfaction to the needs of the masses. They have
also become very hot for the decisive bourgeois forces to handle
because of their attacks on the state forces and the pressure of U.S.
imperialism, with its massive military presence in neighboring
Afghanistan.
The
most important economic interest of the Pakistani bourgeoisie is also
in contradiction to dealing with the Islamists. It needs to be able to
benefit from a pipeline carrying Central Asian oil and natural gas to
its ports. And that requires a stable Afghanistan, which in turn
requires an end to Islamist insurgency there and in the Pakistani
border areas.
All
of these factors point to a deepening instability of the Pakistani
state and the possibility of a social explosion that could shake the
entire region.
Moreover,
it could be an explosion of a magnitude that could go far beyond the
demagogic anti-imperialism of the Islamists and really challenge the
imperialist world order.
A
number of commentators in the bourgeois press have expressed a certain
premonition of this by warning that the situation in Pakistan may
become the biggest danger the U.S. faces in the region. The threat to
the imperialist order posed by a social explosion in Pakistan and the
collapse of the bourgeois state is, in fact, much more fundamental and
more real than any scenario of the country's nuclear arms falling into
the hands of terrorists or nationalist adventurers. The coming period will be one of
intense political
debate
and experimentation in Pakistan and it is possible that new leaderships
may arise that can give some effective expression to the exasperation
of the masses.
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